MOTHER AND SON by Sylvia Stagg GiulianoHONORABLE MENTION(Click on image for larger view)

Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano says, "I could always depend upon my friend Alicia, whose family I had known since my childhood in Ecuador, to lend a helping hand.

She demonstrated this most literally during the year-long process of relocating from the suburbs to my new home and studio in Fort Point, which required extensive renovations (an activity we both loved). Alicia’s energy and enthusiasm, her sheer zest for doing things, is to me the essence of life.

Even when doing things was hard, as it often is for all of us, in all aspects of our journey, she never uttered a word of complaint – about fatigue, or boredom, or inconvenience, or anything else. This was never more apparent than during the weeks between her fatal diagnosis and her death As she’d done all her life, she did what she could to comfort her family and then passed from this earth with serenity, her work on this mortal plane completed and her lovely soul, I like to think, in the hands of God."

Sylvia Stagg-Giuliano was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. An avid amateur photographer from adolescence, she apprenticed at Foto Olympia, a Guayaquil portrait studio.

In 1976 she moved to the Boston area for three years of intensive study at the New England School of Photography. She became a U.S. resident in 1978, and a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1997.

After graduating from NESOP, Sylvia held a staff photographer position at Digital Equipment Corporation for eleven years. During this period, she also pursued her own artistic vision, experimenting with advanced darkroom techniques to produce startlingly original surrealistic imagery.

Sylvia has worked as an independent commercial and fine art photographer since 1991. She has been a resident of the A Street Visual Artists Cooperative in South Boston since 2005, and is an active member of the Fort Points Arts Community.

An early adopter of digital technology, Sylvia has, over the past decade and a half, increasingly focused her artistic energies on creating composited digital photo-illustrations as well as museum-quality commissioned portraits.

Sylvia’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows in the U.S. and South America.

Awards and Honors

2009 Minuteman ARC Community Partnership Award (for the portrait series The Faces
of Minuteman ARC)

Buildings hold scars like people hold scars.
They can be covered over but eventually time brings them to the surface.
Rafkin says, "Early this year, 2015, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin and stay for an extended period of time. This opportunity came about due to convergence of events in my life - the abrupt ending of a long term relationship late in 2014, my living in Europe plus friends that wanted to help me through this difficult period by offering me a sanctuary to gather my thoughts and focus on my art practice.

During the first week in Berlin I spent my time giving myself space to heal my own ‘break’ while wandering Berlin, opening myself up to what inspiration I might find to direct my work. It was during that time I noticed the amount of scars the older buildings in Berlin bare. Everywhere I went I saw shrapnel wounds or repairs that left visible evidence that something had happened there. I became entranced with these details, with this marks of the building’s and the societies’ history.

The wounds spoke to me and in them I saw not only the anger and hurt of the past but the beauty of their existence. Berlin is what it is, not in spite of these marks of history, but partially because of them and they can be beautiful; I wanted to honor that, to get close and witness it - to show the beauty.
This is what led me to seven weeks of traversing Berlin on foot for hours, looking and searching for these scars of time. Creating what is abstract at first glance but is actually a record of the life of Berlin of beauty from pain and destruction… and in return, Berlin said to me it’s okay to have scars.

2018 version ( I got a lot of comments about the personal nature of the original statement, as I've healed from teh circumstances the work has evolved into being a metaphor for the way we as people deal with traumas) :

Creating what is abstract at first glance, but is actually a record of the life - beauty from pain and destruction- a metaphor for the scars we all have that make us who we are.
We all suffer tragedy and pain; it is part of the human existence. We can choose to remember it and learn from it.

Change it into something beautiful or we can choose to forget it, ignore it, cover it up and risk returning to it later to be hurt again.
These marks are of Berlin and they remain to remind everyone of the communal history. I became entranced with these details while exploring the city, these marks of the society's’ history and the acknowledgement of their past. They choose to remember, discuss and live with it as part of their being.

The wounds spoke to me, and in them I saw not only the anger and hurt of the past but the beauty of their existence. The way the city acts as a corporeal body for the culture at large, exposing it’s scars and accepting them."

Tamara Rafkin is an American / Belgian artist. Having grown up in Charleston SC and obtaining a BFA from The Atlanta College of Art, in the early 1990’s she has exhibited her photographic artworks extensively in the US, Europe and in Brazil.

Her imagery walks the line between the documentary and the narrative approaching the subject of how our emotions and culture are imprinted on our public spaces. A subject that she is drawn to both by personal history and an interest in cultural anthropology, perpetuated by having lived in several regions of the US and in Belgium.

Tamar Haytayan says, "Where do you feel your grief today?
Do you want to feel it?
Do you want to remember it?
It is ok if you don't
we do not want to feel all the pain
lodged in our body
all the time
today though
I want to feel it
in its entirety
I want it to speak with me
this pain
this sorrow
this grief
as I know on the other side
maybe even tomorrow
or in one hour
there will be
some joy
some love
some fun
Life as we know it.
Where do you want to feel your grief today?
Where do you feel your grief?
Where do you feel your joy?
They are intertwined
They come together
twins
born of the same
and yet
nothing like each other
Where do you feel your grief today?
Is it in the joy you are feeling right now?"
Tamar Haytayan’s work explores the relationship with the self and others, challenging the notion of the ideal relationship and the complexity of contrasting feelings."

Tamar Haytayan studied photography at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design and her body of work spans over the last 28 years. Tamar continues to work on several projects, one of her recent ones concentrating on the relationship between fathers and daughters.

Photo Workshop at Hope in Shadows Event in Vancouver, September 2014
Ongoing project with kids at an inner city school in Vancouver
Sparkfly – Women’s gathering in Vancouver to share, inspire and create

Even rating higher than unprepared childbirth or amputation. Being diagnosed with a rare pain syndrome and loosing movement in my left thumb in my late 20’s wasn’t easy.

Excepting and living with constant high levels of pain has been a long difficult road with constant medication changes Physical therapy and experimental treatments.

One treatment I undergo is Ketamine infusion’s. Where I’m put in to a medically induced coma thru IV pump with Ketamine till my brain disconnects with my nervous system and resets, lowering the pain I’m in.

I have to do this more than you can imagine.

Otherwise I wouldn’t even be able to handle having a light breeze hit my skin without excruciating pain.

My work expresses the inner battles I fight and how the pain and medication has changed the way I look at the world. Using photography to improve my life by giving a outlet to express emotions threw images instead bottling them up inside.

Wes Bell says of his series, 'Snag', "Four years ago, I was leaving for the airport after saying goodbye to my mother. She was dying of cancer.

On the long drive across the windblown Alberta prairie, I found myself distracted by flapping remnants of plastic bags, caught in barbed-wire fences that lined the ditches. Whipped violently by the merciless wind, they were left shredded and lacerated, but trapped nonetheless in the no man's land of boundary fences, neither here nor there, caught somewhere in an emotional purgatory between life and death.

Thinking about mortality, pain and death in the context of my mother's terminal illness that in the end took her life, these forgotten shreds of plastic took on a deeper significance. Snag.

Shooting during the seemingly lifeless seasons between winter and spring in 2015 through 2017, I photographed sixty-eight of these ubiquitous sites in Southern Alberta, Canada.

Some locations required multiple visits to ensure the optimal lighting and wind conditions to maximize the isolation and elevation of these commonly unseen objects.

All the photographs were shot using black and white analogue film in a medium square format camera. Given the focus of the subject matter on physical, material processes of deconstruction by natural forces, it was critical to the logic of this series to maintain the immediacy of their chemical, indexical imprint on the film. Its translation onto a slightly warm toned fiber-based photo paper creates a material, substantial presence that would have been impossible to achieve digitally."

Wes Bell was born and raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta. From an early age he was fascinated by art, which led him to the studio-intensive program at the Alberta College of Art and Design, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography.

After school he pursued a career in fashion photography. Bell lived and worked in Milan and London, eventually relocating to New York, while travelling the world extensively on assignment to meet his client’s needs. His acute sense of design, style and aesthetics were highly respected by fashion editors, leading to editorial spreads in publications such as British GQ and Esquire, Conde Nast Traveler and The New York Times Magazine. However, despite his success, his true love for the fine arts persisted.

Since departing the fast-paced commercial world of freelance fashion photography, he has reignited a passion for photography as art, and today he photographs on location, responding to the natural beauty in the outlying boundaries of small Alberta cities and towns and in the rural environments that surround him. Wes returned to live in Alberta three years ago after residing in New York for more than twenty years.

On his new journey as an emerging fine artist, Bell has produced five interrelated photographic series of work. These previously unseen bodies of work were first presented for submission calls in late 2016. Over this short period of time as a new artist on the scene, he has notably exhibited his photographs both in Canada and internationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions. He is a recipient of the LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017 – Jurist Award as selected by MaryAnne Golon, Director of Photography at The Washington Post. More recently, he received the 2017 Bronze Award for the Royal Photographic Society International Photography Exhibition 160 in London, UK.

MISSING MAY 1 by Yasmeen MeliusFIRST PLACE(Click on image for larger view)

Yasmeen Melius says, "Viewing 'Missing May,' reveals not only a process of grief but my longing for her and the unspoken goodbye."

Melius’ practice is focused on photography and writing, in which she explores personal experiences, thoughts and questions.

With the influence of philosophy and narrative, her work increases the dynamic between artist and audience through expression, while investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations. The artist's fusion of delicate surfaces, raw subjects and her honesty of being, allow the audience to reflect on both themselves and the subject.

Yelena Zhavoronkova says of this series, 'Dead End', "Some places are hard to visit or even drive by.

For different reasons. Over the years I collected quite a number of these spots in the city of San Francisco, where I live since the early 1990s.

To break the pattern, to remove the spell which is giving me the heart ache every time I am passing by one of those areas, I started to visit them with my camera, reliving the moments from my past.

The name of the project, the "Dead End", is coming from one of the images, and is very accurately describing the situation my life put me into a few years ago. In my native Russian, the end of the road, "tu-PIK", doesn't sound that literate as it sounds in English though could also be used to express the sadness and hopelessness.

Here is the beginning of my long journey, which is still ahead of me, but with a great hope for the best."

Yelena Zhavoronkova is a California based Fine Art Photographer and Graphic Designer. She received a Master’s degree in Industrial Design from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and Industry, Russia, and has worked as a graphic designer for over three decades. Over the past decade Yelena has been intensively studying and working in photography, which helps her to express her artistic vision.

Yelena’s projects are simultaneously very personal and universal in nature, speaking to the viewers on an intimate level that is familiar to all.

Since 2010 her projects were exhibited in de Young Museum of Arts in San Francisco, City Hall of San Francisco and RayKo Photo Center of San Francisco; Blue Sky Gallery and LightBox Gallery in Oregon; and many other galleries around the United States and in Europe. Her works were published in the online edition of The New Yorker magazine, featured in Shutterbug magazine and Transformation literary journal, among others.

As a part of the Indie Photobook Library Collection Yelena’s “Memories in Red” book is included in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Yelena’s Archival Digital, Silver Gelatin and Platinum/Palladium prints are the part of many private collections and institutions in USA and in Europe. Currently she represented by the Anzenberger Gallery in Vienna, Austria and Corden|Potts Gallery, San Francisco, CA.